The house was jumping. People were ranting and raving and running up and down the stairs, hanging out windows, throwing water, throwing up; some kissed and touched and nearly fornicated in the open, some danced barefoot swinging bottles of drink to the music—the loud ever-present music—their heads thrown back in almost religious exaltation, the music pounding, pounding through it all like the tom-tom drums of the warriors just after the pillage and the plunder have ceased, and the warriors, happy and drunk, thank their gods that they, unlike their fellows, lived to make love to their wives and to rock their children on their knees. Antonio stumbled over to Horace once again, saying the group was about to go to the graveyard. Do you want to come along? Why not?

Standing here, now, far into the cemetery, over the very spot he had originally been with the seven actors, men and women, he was both disquieted and fascinated with that night, and dissected it in his mind as a true scientist—clinical, clean, objective. The pot. The pills. The literal orgy. The strange inevitability of it, for, in a way—like witches in a coven under a full moon, like wild wolves tearing hungrily at one another’s flesh, like hogs wallowing in their own excrement and sin and lonely inarticulateness­—­they were left to this for expression, this for comfort, this for attention, this for love. But as he did what he did, he did not feel the thrill he expected would accompany such things. It was not the otherworldly event he knew it should be, nor was it satisfying. The moon did not change color or phase, lightning did not flash, the earth did not quake, the sun did not rise They were left only tired and stoned and dirty and smelly and empty.

This memory lodged itself in his soul like an unmelting, unmeltable sliver of ice.

Within the cemetery he suddenly felt colder, much colder, wanting to ask the apparition only a few feet in front of him where they were going, why the voice had abandoned him, where the other spirits were, why he was here within this parody of a parody. So many questions. But he did not ask, and the spirit moved on, through the tombstones, across the now dew-covered grass, beneath the solemn and silent oaks and maples and sycamores that had stood here, had grown here, for decades upon decades.